Awhile back I heard a rumour that Yahoo! had a “Gears-like” project that was cancelled. I thought this was a shame, as having Yahoo! pushing the browser would be a great thing, and I wished that we could all join forces and push together.

After 3 years of hiding out in the campuses of Yahoo! itâ€™s good to finally have something external to show for it. Most exciting is the release of BrowserPlus, a software and software distribution framework that allows device developers (desktop, mobile, etc.) to seamlessly bridge the browser programming environment (DHTML, JS) to any component they can dream up (VoIP, image manipulation, data caching, etc.). Some time ago we created a platform team to focus on device software at Yahoo! and this is what has emerged amidst the quickly shifting strategy of the mothership. The 1.0 release of BrowserPlus is intended only for use by Yahoo! sites to enhance customer experiences; however, in the coming months, developers might expect the ability to use components on their own sites.

In the meantime, you can hack the framework on your own system after youâ€™ve installed it to start experimenting. You can experience BrowserPlus currently through the PhotoDropper module on Mash, though direct installs are available for mac or pc

There isn’t a lot of information out there, but hopefully we will here more soon. It currently doesn’t seem to be open source, but I would love to reach out to the team, and Yahoo! in general. I consider Yahoo! a proponent of the Open Web, and would love to see us work together in a way that pushes the browser platform forward from the point of view of Web developers (as compared to browser vendors).

It would be great to take the PhotoDropper, and make the generic kick arse file uploader (input type="file" multiple="true") that I have wanted for a long time.

PhotoDropper is a Mash module that allows you to drag and drop photos from the desktop directly into the browser. Once dropped, you can apply filters and rotate the image. All the processing happens on the client. Then you press Save and the image is scaled (again, on the client) and uploaded to your Flickr account. All this is done without flash and without [input type=file].